Perfect

by Rachel Joyce

  ‘Are you sure?’ said James.

  ‘My second hand went backwards. I saw it. Then when I looked again at my watch it started going the right way. It definitely happened.’

  ‘There was nothing about it in The Times.’

  ‘There was nothing about it on Nationwide. I saw the whole thing last night and no one mentioned it.’

  James glanced at his watch. It was Swiss-made with a thick leather strap and had belonged to his father. There were no digits to show the minutes, only a small window for the date. ‘You’re sure? You’re sure you saw?’

  ‘I’m positive.’

  ‘Why, though? Why would they add the seconds and not tell us?’

  Byron screwed up his face to stop the tears. ‘I don’t know.’ He wished he had a beetle keyring. He wished he had an aunt who sent him lucky talismans from Africa.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said James.

  Byron gave a vigorous nod that shook his eyeballs up and down inside his head. ‘Dépêchez-vous. Les autres are waiting.’

  James turned towards the pitch and took a deep breath. He ran with his knees high and his arms going up and down like pistons. If he carried on at that speed he would pass out before he got there. Byron rubbed his eyes in case anyone was looking, and then he sneezed several times so that, if they were still looking, they might think he had hay fever or some sort of sudden summer cold.

  The key for the new Jaguar had been a gift to his mother after she passed her driving test. His father rarely indulged in surprises. Diana, on the other hand, was more spontaneous. She bought a present because she wanted you to have it and wrapped it in tissue and ribbon, even if it was not your birthday. His father had not wrapped the key. He had placed it in a box beneath a white lace handkerchief. ‘Oh my goodness,’ she’d said. ‘What a surprise.’ She didn’t seem to realize about the key at first. She just kept touching the handkerchief and looking confused. It was embroidered with her initial, D, and small pink roses.

  At last Seymour had said, ‘For God’s sake, darling,’ only the word came out wrong and sounded less like a term of endearment and more like a threat. That was when she had lifted the handkerchief and found the key with its special Jaguar emblem embossed on the leather tag.

  ‘Oh Seymour,’ she said over and over. ‘You shouldn’t. You haven’t. I can’t.’

  His father had nodded in that formal way of his, as if his body was dying to leap about but his clothes wouldn’t make room. Now people would sit up and take notice, he had said. No one would look down on the Hemmings now. Diana had said yes, darling, everyone would be so envious. She really was the luckiest woman. She had reached out her hand to stroke his head and, closing his eyes, he had rested his brow on her shoulder as if he was suddenly tired.

  When they kissed, his father murmured as if he were hungry and the children slid away.

  Diana had been right about the mothers. They had crowded round the new car. They had touched the mahogany dashboard and the leather upholstery and practised sitting in the driving seat. Deirdre Watkins said she would never be satisfied with her Mini Cooper again. The Jaguar even smelt expensive, said the new mother. (No one had quite got her name.) And all the while, Diana had flapped after them with her handkerchief, rubbing off finger marks and smiling uncomfortably.

  Each weekend his father asked the same questions. Were the children wiping their shoes? Was she polishing the chrome grille? Did everyone know? Of course, of course, she said. All the mothers were green. Had they told the fathers? Yes, yes, she smiled again. ‘They talk about it all the time. You’re so good to me, Seymour.’ His father would try to hide his happiness behind his napkin.

  Thinking of the Jaguar and his mother, Byron’s heart bounced so hard inside his chest he was afraid it would wear a hole. He had to press his hand to his chest in case he was having a heart attack.

  ‘Daydreaming, Hemmings?’ In class Mr Roper pulled him to his feet and told the boys this was what you looked like if you were an ignoramus.

  It made no difference. Whatever Byron did, staring at his books or out of the window, the words and hills floated out of focus. All he could see was the little girl. The curled-up shape of her, just beyond the passenger window, caught beneath her red bicycle, its wheels whisking the air. She lay so still it was as if she had stopped suddenly where she was and decided to fall asleep. Byron stared at his wristwatch and the relentless progress of its second hand, and it was like being eaten.

  4

  Things That Have to Be Done

  JIM UNLOCKS THE door to his van and slides it open. He has to stoop to step inside. White winter moonlight falls in a cold shaft through the window and shines on the laminated surfaces. There is a small two-ring hob, a sink, a fold-out table and, to his right, a bench seat that pulls out to form a bed. Sliding the door shut, Jim locks it, and the rituals begin.

  ‘Door, hello,’ he says. ‘Taps, hello.’ He greets each of his possessions. ‘Kettle hello, Roll-up Mattress hello, Small Cactus Plant hello, Jubilee Tea Towel hello.’ Nothing must be left out. When everything has been greeted, he unlocks the door, opens it and steps back outside. His breath blooms into the dark. There is music from the house with the foreign students and already the old man who sits all day at his window has gone to bed. To the west, the last of the rush-hour traffic makes its way across the upper peaks of the moor. Then a dog barks and someone yells at it to shut up. Jim unlocks the door to the van and steps inside.

  He performs the ritual twenty-one times. That’s the number it has to be done. He steps in the van. He greets his things. He steps out of the van. In, hello, out. In, hello, out. Locking and unlocking the door every time.

  Twenty-one is safe. Nothing will happen if he does it twenty-one times. Twenty is not safe and neither is twenty-two. If something else swings into his mind – an image or a different word – the whole process must begin again.

  No one has any idea about this part of Jim’s life. On the estate, he straightens the wheelie bins or picks up small items of litter. He says, H-hello, how are you? to the boys at the skate ramp, and he carries the recycling boxes sometimes to help the refuse collectors, and no one would know what he must go through when he is alone. There is a lady with a dog who sometimes asks where he lives, if he would like to join her one day for bingo in the community centre. They have lovely prizes, she says; sometimes a meal for two at the pub in town. But Jim makes his excuses.

  Once he has finished stepping in and out of the van, there is more. There will be lying on his stomach to seal the doorframe with duct tape and then the windows, in case of intruders. There will be checking the cupboards and under the pull-out bed and behind the curtains, over and over. Sometimes, even when it is finished, he still doesn’t feel safe and the whole process must begin again, not just with the duct tape, but also with the key. Giddy with tiredness, he steps in and out, locking the door, unlocking it again. Saying Foot Mat hello. Taps hello.

  He has had no real friends since he was at school. He has never been with a woman. Since the closure of Besley Hill, he has wished for both, for friends, for love – for knowing and being known – but if you are stepping in and out of doors, and greeting inanimate objects, as well as securing openings with duct tape, there isn’t much left-over time. Besides, he’s often so nervous he can’t say the words.

  Jim surveys the inside of the van. The windows. The cupboards. Every crack has been sealed, even around the pop-up roof, and it is like being inside a tightly wrapped parcel. Suddenly he knows he has done everything and relief swamps him. It is as good as being freshly scrubbed. Across Cranham Moor the church clock strikes two. He has no watch. He hasn’t had one in years.

  There are four hours left to sleep.

  5

  The Lady Contortionist

  JAMES LOWE ONCE told Byron that magic was about playing with the truth. It wasn’t a lie. What people saw, he said, depended largely on what they were looking for. When a woman was sawn in half at Billy Smart’s Circus, fo
r instance, this was not real. It was an illusion of reality. It was a trick to make you see the truth in a different way.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Byron.

  James neatened the flop of his fringe and explained some more. He even sharpened his pencil and drew a diagram. The assistant, he said, would step into the box and the magician would close the lid, so that her head would stick out at one end and her feet at the other. But then the magician would spin the box and when her shoes were pointing away from the audience, the assistant would tuck in her real feet and replace them with two fake ones. The lady would be a contortionist, so she would fold her legs into the upper part of the box and the magician would saw her down the middle.

  ‘You see?’ said James.

  ‘I still can’t watch him doing it. I don’t like to think of her feet coming off.’

  James had agreed this was a significant problem. ‘Maybe you should eat your candyfloss during that part,’ he said.

  Byron’s mother was not a contortionist. Sometimes he caught her listening to her music on the gramophone and swaying. Once he even saw her lift her arms as if she had placed them on the shoulders of someone who was not there, then swirl in circles as if they were dancing, but that did not make her a magician’s assistant either. And yet after school she stood waiting with Lucy, and there was nothing different about her. She wore her pink summer coat with matching handbag and shoes. Other women mentioned dates and she smiled at each of them and fetched out her notebook. No one would have guessed that only hours beforehand she had hurt a small child and driven away without stopping.

  ‘Mothers’ coffee next Wednesday,’ she said, writing the date carefully. ‘I will be there.’

  ‘What have you done to your hand, Diana?’ said someone. Andrea Lowe maybe.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’

  Once again, no one mentioned the accident. No one mentioned the extra seconds.

  ‘Au revoir, Hemmings,’ said James.

  ‘Au revoir, Lowe,’ said Byron.

  Walking the children to the car, Diana unlocked the doors without flinching. He watched her carefully, waiting for her to betray some small sign of anxiety, but she asked him about his day and checked the position of her seat, and there was still no hint of anything different. When they drove past Digby Road, with the burnt-out vehicle on the corner, he was so anxious he had to sing. His mother merely adjusted her sunglasses and faced straight ahead.

  ‘Yes, we’ve had another lovely day,’ she said on the telephone to his father later that afternoon. She poked the plastic coils of the cord around her forefinger so that they looked like a batch of white rings. ‘It was hot. I tidied the rose beds. I did the washing. I made a few things for the freezer. The weatherman says more sun.’ Byron kept wanting to ask about the accident and it was like having to sit on himself in order to remain quiet. He took a stool at the breakfast bar while she prepared the evening meal, wondering if he stayed silent how long it would take his mother to turn to him and say something. He counted each second, each minute that she said nothing, and then he remembered again that the reason his mother said nothing was because she had no idea what she had done.

  ‘You should get some fresh air,’ she said. ‘You look worn down, sweetheart.’

  Byron took the opportunity to slip to the garage. He pulled down the door behind him, leaving just a crack of daylight, and then he removed his torch from his blazer pocket in order to examine the Jaguar. There was no sign of damage. Slowly he moved the beam of light from left to right, scanning it more carefully now, but there was not a scratch. He touched the paintwork with his fingertips. The doors. The bonnet. The silver frame felt smooth beneath his fingertips. Still he found nothing.

  The garage was dark and cold and smelt of oil. Byron had to keep checking over his shoulder in case anyone was watching. Along the back wall loomed the profile of Diana’s old furniture, draped with sheets; it had been sent from her mother’s house after she died. He had lifted the covers once with James and found a standard lamp with a deep red, tasselled shade, as well as a set of tables and an old armchair. James said someone had probably died in that chair, maybe even the woman who was Diana’s mother. (Byron could not call her Grandma because he had never met her.) It was a relief to slide down the garage door and leave all this behind.

  Outside the sky was as open as a blue dish, the air was thick and scented with heat. Lupins stood tall like coloured pokers and the roses and peonies were in bloom. Everything in the garden had a place; nothing hurt the eye. The pink beds seeped into white ones and then into blue, the smaller shapes became bigger ones. Already the fruit trees bore small green buds like marbles, where only weeks ago there had been a scrambling of white blossom. Byron smelt the sweetness of the air and it was so substantial it was like walking into the hall and hearing his mother’s gramophone music before he found her. The smells, the flowers, the house – these things were surely bigger than what she had done that morning. Besides, even though his mother had committed a crime, it was not her fault. The accident had happened because of the two extra seconds. He dreaded what his father would say if he knew. It was lucky nothing had happened to the Jaguar.

  ‘Lamb cutlets for tea,’ said his mother. She served them with frilled white paper crowns and gravy.

  He couldn’t eat. He could only carve his meat into small pieces and blend it with his potato. When his mother asked why he wasn’t hungry, he told her he had an ache and she rushed to fetch the thermometer. ‘What about your Sunquick?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want that either?’

  He wondered what had happened to the little girl, whether her parents had found her, or neighbours. How badly she was hurt.

  ‘I will have Byron’s Sunquick,’ said Lucy.

  Byron had always liked the way his mother referred to an item by its brand name. It implied a specificity he found reassuring. It was like the small reminders she left for herself on the telephone pad (‘Polish Lucy’s Clarks’ shoes. Buy Turtle Wax polish’); a label suggested there was one correct name for each thing and no room for mistakes. Now, as he watched her tidying the kitchen and singing under her breath, the irony of it brought a lump to this throat. He must do everything in his power to keep her safe.

  While his mother ran water for the washing-up, Byron went outside to speak to Lucy. He found her hunkered on the stone slabs of the terrace in front of a bed of jewel-coloured wallflowers. She was arranging four garden snails in order of shell size and also speed. He asked in a casual way how she was and she said she was very well, except that he was kneeling on her snails’ finishing line. Byron shifted to another spot.

  ‘Are you all right about this morning?’ He cleared his throat. ‘About the thing that happened?’

  ‘What happened?’ said Lucy. She still had a smear of Angel Delight around her mouth.

  ‘When we went – to you know where.’ Byron winked expansively. Lucy lifted her hands to her face.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like that.’

  ‘Did you—? Did you see anything?’

  Lucy realigned one of her snails with the starting line because it seemed to be racing backwards. ‘I wasn’t looking. I was like this, Byron.’ Smothering her eyes with her hands, she demonstrated how frightened she had been.

  The situation required all Byron’s skill. He twisted his fringe, the way James did when he was thinking something through. It might upset their father, he explained slowly, if he found out they had gone down Digby Road. It was important not to say it when he came for his weekend visit. It was important to act as if they had never been there.

  ‘Supposing I forget?’ Suddenly Lucy’s mouth wobbled and he was afraid she might cry. ‘Supposing I forget we wasn’t there?’ She often got her words confused. It was worse when she was upset or tired.

  Overwhelmed, Byron stooped to embrace her. She smelt of sugar and pink and he understood in that moment that they had become different, that she was still a child while he knew something bigger. The realiz
ation gave him a bubbling in his stomach that was like Christmas morning, only without the presents. He glanced towards his mother in the kitchen, drying plates by the window and caught in the crimson glow of aureole light. He was aware he had reached a landmark in his life, a defining moment, and even though he had not been expecting a landmark or a defining moment it was part of becoming a man, just as passing his scholarship exam would be part of that. He must rise to both.

  ‘Everything will be all right. I promise you.’ He nodded the way his father did when he was stating a fact, as if he was so correct even his own head had to agree. ‘You just need to put this morning out of your mind.’ Byron leaned to plant a kiss on her cheek. This was not manly but it was what his mother would do.

  Lucy pulled back, her nose wrinkled. He was afraid she would cry so he reached for his handkerchief. ‘You have stinky breath, Byron,’ she said. She skipped back into the house, her pigtails thumping her shoulder blades, her knees tucked high, and crunching at least two of her snails beneath her shiny school shoes.

  That night Byron watched both the six o’clock news and Nationwide. There was more fighting in Ireland but no mention of the accident and no mention of the two extra seconds. He felt clammy and sick.

  What would James do? It was hard to imagine Andrea Lowe making a mistake. If the situations were reversed, James would be logical. He would draw a diagram to explain things. Despite the fact the children were not allowed, Byron carefully unclicked the door to his father’s study.

  Beyond the window, the garden was bathed in warm light, the spires of red-hot poker glowing in the evening sun, but the room was still and cool. The wooden desk and chair were polished like museum furniture. Even the tin of fudge sweets and decanter of whisky were things you must not touch. It was the same with his father. If Byron ever tried to hug him, and sometimes he wished he could, the embrace ran away at the last minute and became a handshake.